windows 98 se upgrade?

[Anonymous]

I need to be able to upgrade windows 95 to 98 se but as far as I know that disk doesn\'t exist and I don\'t want to upgrade to 98 original and then go windows update for everything that\'s missing is there a way to modify either 98 se so that it will upgrade or 98 upgrade so that it is se?

[Josetann]

There is such a thing as a regular Win98SE upgrade CD that will upgrade from Windows 95.  Sounds like you\'re talking about the one that only lets you upgrade from within Windows 98 (can\'t do a clean install even with a previous windows cd, and can\'t upgrade from windows 95).

So if you\'re asking if it can be done...yes.  Just get the regular Win98SE upgrade CD.

[Anonymous]

ok wait you\'re saying if I have an original windows 98 upgrade cd AND a windows 98 se full install cd I could do the upgrade that way

if so I got it beat

[Anonymous]

why r u still talking about windows 98

[Anonymous]

well this particular laptop a dell has only one expansion slot for ram and the largest stick available for it is 64 mb giving me a total of 96 and I am not fond of windows me and mostly I am talking about windows 98 because that is the operating system I had a question about at the moment

do you have an answer to my question or just more cynisim

[Butcher0]

If you limit your vcache to 2000 and use the /NM undocumented installation switch you can use 95, 95OEM, 95v2?, 98, 98SE and even ME with as little as 16MB of RAM.  I have run 98SE on a 486SX-33 with 16MB RAM installed and configured in this manner and it runs, surprisingly, quite adequately.

However, don\'t try to use the Internet with an ISP that uses a lot of advertising popups!

If one chooses to use ME in this manner, you MUST completely disable the System Restore feature or it will really drag.

[Josetann]

No.  If you have a Win98SE full version CD, that\'s all you need.  It\'ll do the upgrade for you.  If it\'s an OEM cd though...then it would only do a clean install.  Here\'s what the different versions do:

Full Retail:  Clean install or upgrade existing version
Upgrade:  Clean install with proof of previous windows version (i.e. putting in a windows 95 cd when it asks you to) or upgrade existing version
OEM:  Clean install only (there is a workaround to make it do an upgrade though)

[Anonymous]

ok two questions then
one can I determine for certain that the disk is or is not an oem
two what is the workaround if it isn\'t too lengthy to go into here

I would have sworn that it was a full install disk but it will not perform an upgrade on windows 95 it starts but won\'t finish which tells me it has to be an oem

anyway thank you very much for all of the help

[Josetann]

What does it say when you run setup from within Windows?  Does it say that it cannot upgrade this version of Windows or something like that?  If so then yeah you have an OEM cd.  If not, then tell us what error it does give so we can help you out.

Now I\'d recommend doing a clean install anyways.  It\'s always better than doing an upgrade.  But if you must upgrade, and assuming you are allowed to use the OEM cd on that PC...then boot the PC to dos, rename the win.com file in your c:windows directory to something else (such as win.bak...now do NOT delete the file just in case you can\'t get the install to work and need to go back to using win95).  Now run the setup program from the CD (in dos mode) and it should work.  An OEM cd checks to see if win.com is present and if not, then will go ahead and install.  Now, I haven\'t tried this method to do an upgrade install but others have said it works fine.  So YMMV.

[wdygfy1]

It does start the install process and gets all the way to just past the make a emergency disk then at the point where it would actually start to copy new files is when I get the error and I do believe there is a number with it which I will post here but I have to run the install again first. The syntax is pretty much what you said though something like you can\'t run this version from inside windows try running from dos I think I will also post the exact wording with the number

thanx again

[Anonymous]

it was an oem cd and that workaround did work but the resulting os was very unstable (I refreshed device manager and my video went haywire in that every time i moved the mouse my screen disappeared and all i got was random coloring all over)
I did this on a machine that I knew I could do a clean install from just in case of something like that
I appreciate all the help very much though
thanx again

[Anonymous]

There is no \"upgrade\", you\'ll need the full version and when you install from win95 it\'ll asks you if you want to upgrade the win95 version with the most current one (win98se). even asks you if you want to save the files from the older version in case yoiu want to restore to the previous version.